Nature of Things: Toll road plan still woefully short on details

Tom Palmer @ledgertom

Saturday

Feb 22, 2020 at 12:01 PM

The only map that’s been released is a poorly detailed first draft of areas the new road should avoid.

The legislative-mandated effort to create a new highway through southwest Florida from Lakeland to Naples through possibly some of the last wild areas of this state remains long on rhetoric and short on details.

That’s how things looked during the latest task force meeting in Moore Haven.

There are still no maps of proposed routes or paths within which the routes might lie even though they were promised to be rolled out by last month.

The transportation folks did issue a first draft of a map showing places they should avoid. The scale on the map I saw is too small to tease out too many details, but it appears to be nothing more than a plan to go around some existing conservation areas while ignoring others.

Such a map, of course, leaves out large tracts that are on the state purchase list for either protection of working farmlands or expansion of existing conservation areas and any lands nearby where suburban sprawl will diminish the land’s conservation value.

Development brings noise, traffic, more air pollution and domestic pets that prey on native wildlife.

The prospects of land protection are still dim in Tallahassee. It seems the same folks who are eager to build roads no one asked for —except some lobbyists — are reluctant to spend money to protect land that voters overwhelmingly told them to do in a constitutional amendment.

It is still unclear whether county growth plans will influence the path of the proposed toll road or whether the toll roads will force county officials to rewrite their plans.

Once again home rule may be thrown out the window to satisfy another top-down state dictate. But six months into the discussion, local officials are still left in the dark. Add to that the admission that the analysis used county growth plans but ignored city growth plans, even though some city limits contain vast tracts of undeveloped land. Bartow and Winter Haven come to mind.

The discussion on using county land-use maps revealed that there is so much wiggle room in land-use classifications that the distinction between rural and urban development areas can be blurred at times. That is, yeah, the map says low-density rural agricultural, but if you bring in water or sewer lines, or you do a planned development and put in sidewalks and plant trees, welcome to the suburbs.

Using rail more often for freight movement rather than building new roads is an option that doesn’t seem to have been explored enough.

The plans presented on existing state roads didn’t detail which sections are failing to move traffic very well during peak times. That led to questions about how many lanes the ultimate buildout of sections of Interstate 75 would contain. Those extra lanes could affect whether the new road is needed. State transportation officials, who have been ordered to push for the new road, inexplicably claimed not to know the answer.

How to pay for all of this was another work in progress since the turnpike folks don’t have unlimited bonding capacity. That’s because of their existing obligation to deal with the debt they’ve already piled up in building previous projects. The alternatives appear to be raiding another state fund or finding private funding, but that’s still up in the air.

The standard answer to most of these questions from the Florida Department of Transportation staff running the meeting was that they’d try to assemble the data for the next meeting, which will be March 4 in Sebring.

Meanwhile, if anyone had any doubt about the cozy relationship between the roadbuilding lobby and state government, they got another piece of information to bolster those suspicions.

It seems that the Florida Legislature approved a three-year program to turn state agencies into the employee recruitment arm of the roadbuilding industry rather than letting the private sector take on this responsibility itself. Where are those people calling for market solutions instead of government subsidies now?

Additionally, this program sponsors its job fairs in urban areas, where people have jobs for the most part, rather than in rural areas where many people are looking for good jobs based on the higher unemployment rates there.

The pleas from officials in rural counties within the study area for approaches that will improve the local employment situation were well-founded.

However, there was some hesitation from officials at the meeting about any plan that would drastically change the sense of place and quality of life people enjoy in rural areas to a more frenetic urban atmosphere.

There was also a concern that all the construction of a new road would accomplish would be to make it easier for talented members of the local work force to leave for better-paying jobs in more urban areas.

Experienced economic development officials agreed infrastructure is important to attract industrial and commercial growth, but they also told the crowd that there should be some discussion in each community about what people want their community to become so they can plan intelligently to reach that goal.

The alternative, some critics of the toll road scheme allege, is that communities will be told what to become by Tallahassee whether they like it or not.

That has been a consistent theme in Tallahassee. The fight isn’t over.